What makes for a great user experience? How can you consistently design experiences that work well, are easy to use and people want to use? This course will teach you the core process of experience design and how to effectively evaluate your work with the people for whom you are designing. You'll learn fundamental methods of design research that will enable you to effectively understand people, the sequences of their actions, and the context in which they work. Through the assignments, you’ll learn practical techniques for making sense of what you see and transform your observations into meaningful actionable insights and unique opportunity areas for design. You’ll also explore how to generate ideas in response to the opportunities identified and learn methods for making your ideas tangible. By answering specific questions and refining your concepts, you’ll move closer to making your ideas real. We’ll use cases from a variety of industries including health, education, transportation, finance, and beyond to illustrate how these methods work across different domains.
Good luck and we hope you enjoy the course!

From the lesson

Prototyping

After you’ve gone through the ideation process, how do you make your ideas tangible so that you can test them with others and answer critical questions necessary for pushing your idea forward? To help you make ideas real, our final lesson will introduce you to the rules of prototyping including building ideas quickly, making a lot of prototypes, and providing only essential details. We’ll discuss questions you’ll want to ask when testing your idea with different people. You’ll learn the importance of making many prototypes so as not to get attached to any one idea and so you can pick the parts that work best for each idea. Through rapid iteration and testing, you will more quickly get to a meaningful and accessible experience that you will be proud of. We’ll conclude with four popular forms of prototyping including storyboards, role-plays, walkthroughs and touch-points – all forms of prototyping you can do with materials you can find around your home. No coding needed!
What I hope you'll take away from this lesson is a love of making ideas tangible to answer specific questions and how different forms of prototyping will influence the questions you can answer. So we can take all of those ideas written on sticky notes and make them real!

Meet the Instructors

Elizabeth Gerber

Associate Professor, Co-director of the Research Cluster at the Segal Design InstituteMcCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science (Segal Design Institute), School of Communication, Kellogg School of Management (by courtesy), School of Education and Social Policy (by courtesy)

Scott Klemmer

Professor Cognitive Science & Computer Science

In this lesson,

you're gonna learn to make all those wonderful ideas you came up with, real.

Make them tangible.

So you can get real feedback from your teammates as well as for

the people for whom you are designing.

Let me start with this story of Grace.

Grace is a woman I worked with who was frustrated because she had this idea for

a community blog but just couldn't get any traction with it.

She was telling different people about it and they're nodding their heads.

They seem kind of interested.

But she needed some resources from her manager to actually build it.

So that night, she went home and she made a wire frame that is a physical mock up

of what the website would look like, what the community blog would look like, and

she brought it in the next day and she showed her manager.

As soon as she showed her manager that physical demonstration of her idea,

he gave her the resources she needed to make it happen.

So prototypes are a very powerful mechanism for

making your ideas tangible and making the progress you need to do.

Formally, we defined prototyping as the process of quickly and

cheaply making ideas tangible.

To answer specific questions, and getting feedback from others.

Here's a prototype I was shown the other day by a teammate.

I love it.

Can you guess what it is?

It's the temperature gauge for a shower.

Can you see what they made it out of?

A paper plate, a paper cup, some tape, and a tongue depressor.

They made this in about two minutes.

They were able to quickly communicate their idea that they were working on for

a safe temperature gauge for

a shower so kids didn't get burned when they got in the shower.

They could have talked and talked about this.

But they quickly made the prototype.

Showed it to a few kids, and got some feedback on the idea.

I'm going to share with you a few simple rules for

prototyping that will help you make more effective

prototypes that communicate your ideas and get your questions answered more easily.

The first rule of prototyping is to build quickly.

Here's one of my favorite prototypes.

This was made by a colleague of mine who is redesigning the drive-thru

experience for his shop.

At first he started at real scale trying to design a big car and a big storefront.

Then I suggested to him, what if you made this at model scale so

that you could think through the interactions without wasting all the time.

Well, he made this as you can tell in just an hour or so and then he was able to show

potential customers as well as his colleagues the idea that he had.

When he wanted to change the configuration all he had to do is pick up a piece and

move it rather than build an entirely new set.

So we saved a lot of time, a lot of money, and

a lot of effort in making this very low fidelity prototype.

This second rule of prototyping is to make many.

Here are three story boards the designer created for a recommendation system.

So he wanted to think through what are the three different kinds of interactions that

one could have.

The reason he made three to test with users,

was because by making three he was not committed to any one of them.

And he was able to get more feedback because he showed three rather than just

showing one.

The second rule of prototyping is make many.

This is my friend Murk, who is making a hand-held medical device.

He made multiple prototypes as you can see on that table.

He was trying to figure out in this particular test,

what's the exact shape should it be?

Should it be round?

Should it be square?

Edges, how should it be formed?

And by making all of these, he was able to show these to the nurses and

doctors with whom he was working, and

get feedback about which particular attributes they liked of each one.

The third rule of prototyping is to provide only essential details.

This is a lovely prototype made out of tin foil and construction paper.

Can you guess what this is?

This is a ticket purchasing device for the train.

They didn't need to do the whole interface,

they just needed to do this one part that said your ticket.

Because they were trying to understand if they move this position of this interface

to a place where everybody could reach, would it make it easier to use?

They made this prototype in about 20 minutes and

were able to test it with users an hour later.

They hadn't spent hours and days in the lab building this up.

They just took a short amount of time, got feedback on this and then based on that

feedback were able to revise it and show it to another user a couple hours later.

There's four forms of prototyping that we're gonna talk about in this lesson.

The first one is storyboards, role-plays, walk-throughs and touchpoints.

I'll give you illustrations of each one so you can better understand.

The first one is role-play.

Role-play is when you enact the experience in real time

with all the different purchase events to see what it might look like.

In this picture, a team is working on a new interactive museum exhibit

to understand what's the interaction of the child,

that's played by the woman in white.

What's the action of the parent, that's played by the man in blue.

And then the man with the button down shirt in the light blue

is the exhibit itself.

Here's another great role-play example that I love.

In this picture,

what you'll see is there is a man playing the doctor, and then a kid.

What were they trying to understand in this?

They were trying to understand what does it look like to make doctor's appointments

more kid friendly.

What I love about this role-play is that they reenacted the room,

the exam room experience, using really simple materials.

So they didn't have access to a medical room but

instead what they did was they converted an office space into a medical exam room.

If you look on the wall,

with whiteboard they created the different instruments that a doctor might use.

The table in front of the child is just a piece of cardboard.

And then the computer screen behind the person playing the doctor,

is just a piece of cardboard.

So they were able to enact and see what it would be like

to create more children friendly visits with the doctor by doing this.

The result of this prototype was to actually come up with an activity

that allow the doctor and the child to connect more.

They had a coloring book that they both share together.

Here's the behind the scenes picture of that medical

room that I was describing to you.

As you'll see,

it's just an office building that they've converted into a medical space.

They move the furniture around and drew some pictures on the wall

to make it feel like a real medical space and enact what that would look like.

By doing so they were able to elicit the emotions and the behaviors of

the child and the patient that they needed to understand to develop this idea.

Here's another prototype of what we call a walk-through.

So walk-throughs allow people to go through the exact

experience they would as if it was real.

This screen, created on a piece of cardboard with post it notes,

allow people to navigate the hospital system.

They didn't do any programming to make this, but they were able to get a lot of

feedback on the kinds of choices people wanted to make, and

what they expected to see on such a screen when they entered the hospital.

Here's another great prototype that I love, also considered a walk-through.

It's the walk-through of a digital experience.

Now you may be asking yourself, where are the computer screens?

Where's the handheld?

In this project, they realized the most important thing to understand was what was

it like when people first came to the welcome page of the website.

And so what they've prototyped in this picture is the welcome experience.

So their goal was to make the welcome experience feel like

you were walking into somebody's home.

On the ground, you'll see a green sheet of paper.

That's the welcome mat.

So what would it be like to design a website,

where it was as welcoming as if you were walking into somebody's home.

And they were offering you a choice of options,

of things to eat when you came into their home.

They did this walk-through to understand, what are the sequences of events, and

what kind of expectations do people have.

And, how could they use this analogy to inform the design

of their ultimate digital experience.

Here's an example of a touch point.

It's basically a piece of cardboard with a tongue depressor on it.

This team was designing a game that allowed kids to

choose a different character and then enact that character.

It was called Hats!

So they made this touchpoint to see, could the kids,

this was a five year old in this case, spin the dial, see the picture, and

understand that that was the character that they were being given.

As I mentioned earlier, prototypes are meant to answer questions.

So when you go in, you want to be asking what question do I have to answer?

Questions you might ask with each prototype, and

each one might be a different question.

Might be is it useful?

Did I create something?

Is my prototype something that people would actually want to use?

Is it desirable?

Perhaps you create something that works but nobody wants to use it.

Is it easy to use?

Is it functional?

Why or why not?

Is it sustainable?

Again by sustainable we mean both is it good for

the environment and are people willing to pay money for it.

And then because you're going in with many different ideas to test you're gonna ask

how does this one compare with the alternatives.

Once thing I want you to remember with prototypes is they develop over time.

Just like ideas, they may start off as a rough sketch,

move into a more looks-like, and perhaps works-like prototype,

and by the end actually have a functioning prototype.

This is an example from my friend, Hannah.

She was working on a robotic bear for kids with diabetes.

She had this idea several years ago and

at the time she drew a picture of it, you'll see that.

Then she started to actually make it out of stuffed animal material.

So she actually did some sewing and she had a stuffed animal.

It wasn't functional yet, the robotics weren't inside of it, but

it was a teddy bear that kids could hold.

And now several years later she has this all integrated into one

teddy bear that she sells on the market and it started her own company doing this.

She has the bear and the robotics and it's integrated in one, but

it didn't all start off like that.

It did just start off as a rough sketch.

In this lesson, you've learned how to take those ideas, make them tangible and

real so you can test them with other people.

By testing them with other people you'll gain much insight into how the ideas work,